New Jersey Ratifies the Constitution
The New Jersey ratifying caucus approved the Constitution on December 18, 1787. Highly critical of the Articles of Confederation, the delegates acted quickly to ratify the new constitution. New Jersey was the third state to do so, following the votes of Delaware and Pennsylvania.
Now be it known, that we, the delegates of the state of New Jersey, chosen by the people thereof, for the purpose aforesaid, having maturely deliberated on and considered the aforesaid proposed Constitution, do hereby, for and on the behalf of the people of the said state of New Jersey, agree to, ratify, and confirm, the same and every part thereof.
In Convention of the State of New Jersey in The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution (Elliot’s Debates, Vol., 1). A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1875. Law Library
Prior to the American Revolution, New Jersey was part of the original land grant to the Duke of York. He, in turn, granted it to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret in June 1664. The province was divided, in 1676, between the proprietors. By that division, East New Jersey was assigned to Carteret, and West New Jersey to William Penn and others, who had purchased it from Lord Berkeley. The division and divisiveness continued until Queen Anne, in April 1702, reunited both provinces into one province, and by commission appointed a governor over them.
In the nineteenth century, New Jersey was nicknamed “The Garden State.” Abraham Browning, a Camden attorney, is credited with the name, noting that the “Garden State is an immense barrel, filled with good things to eat and open at both ends, with Pennsylvanians grabbing from one end and New Yorkers from the other.”
Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, farmland gave way to urban industry. Today New Jersey exports manufactured goods around the world and is a center of the biotechnology industry.
Tourism is another important industry for New Jersey. Since the nineteenth century, city dwellers have sought cool ocean breezes on the 125 miles of New Jersey coastline. President Ulysses S. Grant was among vacationers who flocked to resorts at Long Branch and Cape May. First opened in 1870—and then only eight feet wide, the Atlantic City boardwalk continues to draw visitors to its beaches and casinos.
New Jersey is home to Princeton University and Rutgers University. Singer Frank Sinatra, suffragist Alice Paul, and football coach Alonzo Stagg were born in the Garden State.
Learn More
- Explore the following online research guides to identify resources available throughout the Library’s collections related to New Jersey. Also included are resources available from external websites:
- Use the search option in Panoramic Maps to find numerous bird’s-eye view maps of New Jersey.
- Millions of stereoscopic views, a form of 3D photography, were produced between the 1850s and the 1930s. In the NYPL’s Robert N. Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic ViewsExternal use the navigation pane on the left side to narrow results to New Jersey and view a wide variety of New Jersey sites.
- Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record/Historic American Landscapes Survey documents achievements in U.S. architecture, engineering, and design. Search the collection on Hoboken, an important nineteenth- and twentieth-century waterfront city in New Jersey, to see that city’s piers, City Hall, and Delaware,Lackawana & Western Railroad & Ferry Terminal.
- Search on the term New Jersey in Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1870 to 1885 to retrieve “My Jersey Queen,” a nineteenth-century song with references to the state.
- A search on New Jersey in Detroit Publishing Company yields more than 500 hits, including a view of Passaic Falls. Search on Atlantic City to find pictures of people bathing at Atlantic City.
- Edison Motion Pictures, a section of the larger collection Inventing Entertainment: the Early Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies, contains 341 early motion pictures. Search on the term New Jersey for material such as the 1895 Princess Ali, recorded at Edison’s Black Maria film studio in West Orange, or the July 1900 actuality film, Burning of the Standard Oil Company’s Tanks, filmed in Bayonne, New Jersey.
- Explore Working in Paterson: Occupational Heritage in an Urban Setting which looks at the industrial heritage and occupational culture of Paterson, New Jersey which was founded in 1791. Materials included in the collection focus on the ways in which community life and values are shaped by work and how the theme of work intersects with other themes, namely family, ethnicity, gender, neighborhood, and change over time.